"Culture" and Culture
Subtitle: Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual Rights
Publisher: Prickly Paradigm Press
Published: November 2007
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 94
ISBN-13: 9780976147565
Subjects: Indigenous peoples; Social & cultural anthropology; Sociology; Social Science; Archaeology / Anthropology; Anthropology - Cultural; Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural
Description: "Increasingly today, intellectual rights over traditional knowledge are fiercely contested and have revived debates about culture in major ways. But how should we make sense of the politics and meaning of culture, knowledge and authorship? What are the unexamined assumptions over the regimes of knowledge that ground the increasingly pervasive legal constructs on intellectual property? What are we to make of inconsistencies that surface in cultural claims? As the Brazilian anthropologist Manuela Carneiro da Cunha highlights in this pamphlet, it is no easy task. By distinguishing "culture" from culture, the former being a reflexive notion that purportedly speaks about the latter, da Cunha shows how such inconsistencies are inherent to any reflexive system. She asks: What are the cognitive as well as pragmatic consequences of the coexistence of "culture" and culture? In answer, da Cunha explains how the loan word "culture," as imported from anthropological jargon, is mobilized by indigenous people to effectively separate interpretive regimes and avoid contradictions." --Book Jacket.